For Election Day: On Some Problematic Presidents

November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.

Have I mentioned that I’m related to all the Presidents? Well, I am, and I figured out where and how in every case. All it takes is the internet, plenty of free time, and an unending store of narcissicism.  In most cases the connections are way distant. You can do it for almost anyone with Anglo-American heritage. Some wiseacres figured out how Obama was related to the Bushes, for example. But in certain cases I have a President’s patrilineal line right in my own tree and sometimes not even too many generations back. This doesn’t mean I am directly descended from any Presidents. I am not. But I am descended from people from whom THEY are descended, such as John Adams’great grandfather’ the immigrant Henry Adams, whom I’m descended from four different ways. And I have Adamses all the way down to one of my great great grandmothers. But I recently learned of another a line to which I am tied a bit farther back, 16th century Yorkshire, but which extends all the way down to my great grandmother: Andrew Jackson. The Adamses and Jackson then are the two Presidents to whom I appear to be most closely releated. Which I find delightfully perverse. John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson were polar opposite political enemies in just about every way.

Adams was one of America’s elite class. His ancestors had been here for two centuries before he was born and he had every advantage. He began apprenticing for government under his famous father when he was 13. Naturally he went to Harvard.  He was born and bred and trained for national leadership. In addition to being president, he had been Secretary of State, US Senator, US Congressman, and at different times the US ambassador to the UK, Russia, Prussia, and the Netherlands. There was no insider who was more inside.

By contrast, though it may be hard for many to comprehend now, in the early 19th century, Andrew Jackson was a relative outsider, a self-made man who started out as a poor orphan from recent immigrant stock. His parents had come from Ireland, although they were of Anglo-Scots heritage. Jackson developed a reputation as a lawyer and local Tennessee politician and became a national military hero by fighting and defeating his two hated enemies, the English and various Native American Tribes.

Jackson was a complicated figure and it’s that latter thing he is most remembered for today for good reason. By the time Jackson came along the whites had been fighting the Native Americans on this continent for centuries in a kind of ad hoc, piecemeal fashion. It was Jackson who came up with this Indian Removal Policy in 1830. REMOVAL. That’s a Final Solution. It resulted in the Trail of Tears, and the uprooting and deaths of thousands across this continent for the next 60+ years. This is well known. There’s even a musical about it.

But there’s a flip side to Andrew Jackson. He was also a class warrior. No, not a social justice warrior, far, far from that, but a class warrior. This made him vastly different from the four Virginia planters and two Boston Adamses who had been our previous Presidents. As a congressman Jackson had once voted against a resolution thankingGeorge Washingtonfor his services to the country. He later left the Senate because he couldn’t even deal with the Adams administration.  Jackson was a Jeffersonian, a faction much more radical and egalitarian and sympathetic to the French Revolution, tumbrils and all. The Federalists were Anglophiles, but the Democratic Party which Jackson helped bring into being were the party of immigrants and the Common Man.

Why was this so earth-shaking? Because at the time of which I speak, the majority of white males were among the disenfranchised and disadvantaged people of the earth. For centuries, like nearly everyone else, poor white males were locked into their station for life as serfs, then indentured servants, tenant farmers, or laborers. They may have been the most powerful people in their own homes, but they could not vote or hold office. They could only trust that they were being taken care of by men in powdered wigs. Even the American Revolution, which liberated this country from a despotic monarchy and an aristocracy, merely transferred political power to a prosperous class of merchants and planters. There were a few self-made men like Benjamin Franklin and my fellow bastard Alexander Hamilton, but those were rare. So this new movement marked the completion of an unrealized part of the American Revolution, the Thomas Paine part, something more in line with the French Revolution, which is to say, an actual revolution.

The movement seems to have been kicked into action by the War of 1812, which brought about a new era of nationalism and finished off the elitist pro-British Federalists, who had been against the war. They were discredited, and a national movement was born to distribute power more widely. In 1821, New York State did away with the property-owning qualification for voting. This elevated the Common Man politically to full citizenship. The Tammany Society was instrumental in that triumph. Many states followed suit and the number of Democrats swelled, leading to the election of Andrew Jackson as President from 1829 to 1837. There is a giddy, almost intoxicating, joyous. celebratory quality to the Jacksonian Democracy in accounts of those times. When you look at the popular culture of those days and for many decades afterward, you find constant reiteration of this concept of the People. The People’s Theatre, the People’s Press, the People’s Vaudeville. But as had been the case in the old world for centuries, even in a republic like Rome, or a Democracy like Greece, politically speaking the People was still actually only some of the people.

The word for this elevation of part of the people, and making them believe they are ALL of the people, is Populism. The fuel of Populism is resentment and scapegoating. Jackson’s two-pronged enemy targets were elites and Native Americans. Though these two different groups were at opposite ends of the pecking order, there were issues on which they could be bundled together, For example, President Jackson’s political enemy and predecessor John Quincy Adams had been relatively humane in his dealings with Native Americans. In 1826 he signed a treaty with the Moscogee Tribe that allowed them to remain in Georgia, much against the wishes of the state government and local populace. This is the sort of thing that Jackson and his followers hated. When he became President, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, clearing the way for all America’s Indian policy going forwards, essentially America’s Final Solution. 

So Andrew Jackson has a kind of Janus legacy. He was a one man fork in the road, progressive and prejudiced at the same time. He was instrumental in extending political rights and power to American men of every class — just not of every color. And not to women. But considering what had always been before this is not nothing.. Good came of it, and not just with respect to white men. The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln was made possible by Jackson, and Lincoln then brought freedom to enslaved African Americans. And Voting Rights for black people, later assured by LBJ, also from poor circumstances, was thus also made possible indirectly by Andrew Jackson. As were our two Irish Catholic Presidents, and a President and a Vice President of color. So Jacksonian Democracy is like the second rung on a ladder with many others above it and it became a template for refining our constitutional system so that suffrage would later be extended to people of color and women and immigrants and young people, and for the extension of other rights to all, over the decades and centuries. The New Deal and the Great Society are among these refinements. You know where I learned to articulate that? Barack Obama, who was also made possible by that process. This evolutionary model is in fact the only conception of American history that can possibly redeem the country. Bad things did happen in the past and you can’t change the past but you can acknowledge it and repair damage and vow to do better now and in the future. That is what redemption is

Some people don’t see it that way. They like things how they were. A certain faction of America never moved away from this ideology of white supremacy and mysogny. Civil War era Democrats of the North were pro-Confederacy, they rioted in the streets of New York rather than fight on behalf of the people of color. After the Civil War came the Southern Dixiecrats who then switched parties after the Civil Rights movement and became Nixon’s hardhat and Southern Coalition and then Reagan Republicans. That was basically my dad’s political evolution.

We come now to a certain President from New York. 

That’s right! Martin Van Buren! (Not!) It’s often said that Andrew Jackson proved that anyone can grow up to be President…but isn’t it really Martin Van Buren who proves that anyone, really anyone can be President? I mean, love or hate him, okay, hate him, but Jackson was actually an extremely able guy, otherwise he would have remained a small town lawyer no one ever heard of. Whereas Van Buren was just this hack politician from New York who helped get Jackson elected and so Jackson turned around and rewarded him, according to his philosophy of patronage.  If we wanted to be really proud of America’s first president from New York, it should have been someone of the caliber of the first half dozen Presidents, men like Alexander Hamilton or John Jay or George Clinton or Robert Livingston or even a a pre-duel Aaron Burr. As it was, those guys did get close to the top job as vice presidents, cabinet officers or Supreme Court justices. My point here is, a lame President set a lame precedent.

Okay, then so I guess it’s the next President from New York that I mean. Well, no, that’s Millard Fillmore. Fillmore was elevated to the Presidency when Zachary Taylor died after serving a year in office due to a digestive ailment caused by eating too much fruit and milk. Look it up! Anyway after his one term, Fillmore was run again as the candidate for an outfit called the Native American party. You heard me right! The Native American Party. That’s gotta be good, right? Nah! It’s not what you think. These Native Americans were not an organized political party of indigenous people seeking to oust the Europeans from the Americas, although that might have been cool. It was a party made up of SECOND Americans, the descendants of the bunch that came in the 1600s, my people, seeking to oust the newer arrivals (the Irish, mostly) in the 1840s and 50s. They called themselves Native Americans because they were born here and their ancestors had been here for a couple of centuries, not because they were first. If you have seen Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, it’s men like that faction led by Daniel Day-Lewis who have street fights with the Irish.  The Native American Party was nicknamed the “Know Nothings”, not because they were ignorant, although let’s face it, they were, but because, much like the Ku Klux Klan, they began as a secret society or a fraternal organization, so when they were asked anything about their group they claimed not to know anything. Always a good sign that you’re on the right side of history when your slogan is the same as Sgt. Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. Anyway, the Know Nothings – not irrelevant to the present moment.

The third and fourth Presidents from New York…were the Roosevelts who were pretty superlative overall, but far from ideal as regards their policies toward Native Americans.

TRof course spent more time in the far west than any other American President. In the early 1880s he moved to the Dakota territory where he hunted bison and ran a cattle ranch. He wrote numerous books and articles about his experiences as a millionaire cowboy and later in the decade he published his four volume history The Winning of the West, a brutal, bloody account of the Indian Wars, which technically weren’t even over yet. In 1886 he gave a speech where he stated that 9 out of 10 Indians were better off dead and he wasn’t so sure about the 10th one. As President in the early 20th century his Native American policy consisted of the vigorous enforcement of the Allotment Act, the general idea of which was to break up reservations, and deal with tribal members as separate individuals, in order to dissolve the native cultures. His administration also issued the hated “haircut order”, wherein food and supplies were withheld from native men who didn’t adopt European style short hair and dress. And while many naturally admire Roosevelt the conservationist, thousands of Natives were in fact displaced to accommodate the national parks. And it was under Roosevelt’s watch in 1907 that the remaining Indian Territory was dissolved and became the state of Oklahoma.

As for Franklin Roosevelt, in 1934 launched his Indian New Deal, which was largely about undoing the abuses of the Allotment Act, by restoring tribal identity and sovereignty. The general criticism of this phase of Indian Affairs was that it did not help Native Americans economically or politically overall, restoring them to a state of dependence and isolation. It also dissolved the legal status of 61 tribal nations, though 45 of them have since been reinstated. But to be fair, that guy had a lot on his plate.

But really it’s the fifth President from New York we’ve been meaning to get to because he’s the one who very defiantly hung a picture of Andrew Jackson in the oval office. Of course, Trump knows nothing about history let alone Andrew Jackson, Steve Bannon told him to hang that up as a signal to his base that he shares their prejudices and animosities. Not just against Native Americans, but against everyone who was not precisely like him.

Now, over the last few years, some of you may have found yourself going “I’m glad so-and-so’s not alive to see this.” I’m glad my parents were not alive in the current era because I’m terrified that they might have enjoyed it to some degree. My father used to get worked up into paroxysms of rage by the incitements of the right wing media and literally used to dream aloud about storming the ramparts of Washington DC armed with a pitchfork in order to stop some vague unspecified takeover of his country by people he didn’t like the looks of. My mother was the type who loved oily orange faced TV stars in tuxedos and limousines, and thought millionaires could do no wrong, so I can’t imagine her giving a damn about pussy grabbing or any related pecadillos. They both would have recognized you-know-who for a fool and an idiot, but probably would have laughed off most of his shenanigans, while very much enjoying his treatment of the people they mutually hated and disrespected and felt threatened by. I’m not really a Puritan about sex and violence in entertainment, but off screens, it must be pointed out that the first has been known to compromise elected officials, and the last is the worst thing an elected official can foster or encourage. That hasn’t seemed to matter to some people.

Anyway, Trump knows as little about history as he does about English, geography, math, gym, home room, or any of the other required fifth grade subjects, but he did hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson in his office. That was a signal. He relishes an angry, divisive style. He hates elites. He hates the Bushes, for example, and Mitt Romney, all elites with colonial origins, in the very same way Jackson hated the Adamses. Trump came from the most diverse place on earth, Queens New York, and yet he scorns and disrespects everyone who lives there. He is the son and grandson of immigrants, but thinks America should pull the ladder up so new ones can’t get in. Literally wanted walls so hot they would burn people, once they swam over the alligator moat.  January 6 reminded some historians of the British destruction of the capitol in 1814; I was also reminded of the drunken mob of Jackson supporters that made a shambles of the White House at his first inaugural ball in 1829. “The President invited us!” was their familiar excuse. And as for his treatment of Native Americans, I beg you to recollect how he wrapped up the Keystone Pipeline stand-off at Standing Rock in 2017, which you may have missed in the midst of his million other daily atrocities. Is there any doubt but that if left unchecked he would wipe out, WIPE out whatever groups of people he thought fit?

Happily, Jackson and Trump differ in at least one crucial aspect: Jackson was terrifyingly competent. That’s how he went from the frontier to the White House. When he set policies, for good or for ill, they were carried out. By contrast, Trump’s only genuine success has been the projection of an illusion that fools a minority portion of the population. The son of a Queens landlord inherits a small fortune, branches out into Manhattan, establishes a well known brand, hobknobs with celebrities, overextends, goes bankrupt several times, loses several fortunes, inflates the value of his brand on paper, borrows from banks who double down on him, cheats on taxes, stiffs his contractors, releases ghost-written books, then has a TV show where he plays a successful New York businessman who knows and understands the intricacies of management and finance and economic levers and pullies, but all he ever demonstrates is the ability to be mean to people. The only tools he ever uses are: borrowing and not paying what you owe.  He makes nothing, he contributes nothing, and anything he has ever built has been accomplished with stolen resources, but millions are convinced he is not only a very smart guy but a good man, despite being caught ON CAMERA being the very definition of a bad man, again and again and again and again, daily for YEARS.  Two thirds of the country look at him and see a criminal but an astounding one third see their favorite TV star, a guy who tells it like it is, a guy who speaks for them. When such a man is indifferent to human life, atrocities happen. 

Please God, put him in our rear view mirror.